This past week, I had the honor of presenting a webinar on Caregiving.com.

In September, I began the Certified Caregiving Consultant training offered by Caregiving.com. We had a check list of activities to complete before we could become officially certified. My final task to become certified was to host a webinar (or twitter chat or chat on Caregiving.com), so I decided to stick to my day job (haha!) and present a webinar.

I wanted to make my webinar count for something, so I focused on the Integrated Supports Star. Integrated Supports is a principle of Charting the LifeCourse, a framework we have been building at UMKC through collaboration with individuals with developmental disabilities, family members, professionals, and systems change agents across the country over the past 6 years.

Integrated Supports is about tapping into all of your available resources. It’s a strategy we can use to get through our everyday lives or plan for the road ahead. Even though we can use it visually to see where our resources may fall, at the same time, we can use the strategy in our heads to help us think through who or what could help us solve a problem. It has helped me in times of major crisis and also reminded me that I was not completely alone in my caregiving journey.

In this webinar, I shared

how to use the Integrated Supports Star to how to troubleshoot daily life or think through long term plans

examples of how the Star can be used to map current and needed supports beyond government services (which often have eligibility rules)

stories from real life family members and caregivers using the Star to think through how to support their caree or loved one

I hope you find the webinar helpful and can see how the Star might help you as a caregiver.. or maybe just as a person who is trying to ‘adult!’